Back in 1990, federal officials had what seemed like a modest idea for
a new program: The U.S. Office of Drug Control Policy would identify a
few areas -- all in the worst inner cities or along the Mexican border
-- where local authorities were having trouble keeping the flow of illicit
drugs under control. Some $25 million -- chickenfeed by federal standards
-- would be parceled out to these "High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Areas" in hopes of helping beef up local drug law enforcement.

Guess what happened?

Seeing a new source of funds for local police equipment, staff and operations,
"Every congressman has raised their hand and said, 'I need relief
from this problem, too,' " explains UCLA public policy professor
Mark A.R. Kleiman.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., recently announced Las Vegas as one of
the latest cities to win the coveted "HIDTA" designation, which
could mean $800,000 in new federal moneys in the first year alone, supposedly
to "coordinate local narcotics investigations."

However, both the volume of drugs moving through this area -- and their
purity -- have actually increased in recent years, despite the existence
of five previously established drug task forces.

What kind of results can officials show for those operations? Just this
week, Las Vegas police and federal officials both refused to so much as
disclose the names of the five pre-existing task forces -- let alone what
they've cost or whether they can demonstrate any palpable success.

Insisting on keeping secret any evidence of their effectiveness -- or,
who knows, the complete waste of every dollar allocated to them on bachelor
parties and sports cars -- FBI Special Agent Daren Borst cited unspecified
"operational concerns."

Coming to your town soon?

This does not instill a lot of confidence in the arrival here of a federal
program which is quickly becoming known around the nation as the "SWAT
Team Full-Employment Act."

HIDTA funding has expanded from $25 million in 1990 to $140 million in
1997 to a projected $205 million in 2001.

But Eric Sterling, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy
Foundation in Washington, D.C., says that growth has been largely attributable
to the desire of local congressmen around the nation to elbow a place
for their constituents at this latest federal feeding trough -- not on
any evidence that HIDTA does any good.

A HIDTA designation for anti-narcotics efforts in a town like Las Vegas
amounts to little more than "a new set of lights and whistles you
put on the old vehicle to make it look fancier," Sterling told Las
Vegas Review-Journal reporter Glenn Puit last week.

With a decade of experience under their belts and 26 HIDT areas now designated
across the nation, one would think the federal government would by now
have gathered some evidence of the program's usefulness. But Professor
Kleiman at UCLA says no independent, in-depth study of the effectiveness
of the HIDTA designation -- and the federal funds that flow in its wake
-- has ever been conducted.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Drug Control Policy responds that HIDTA's
executive board is still "customizing performance measurement tools"
for the added funds justified by the Trafficking Area designations. That
is to say: Not only do they not know whether the $1.2 billion spent so
far has done any good ... they haven't even figured out how to measure
whether it's done any good.

It's tempting to say the War on Drugs isn't working. In fact, it's working
very well as a justification for allocating billions of additional tax
dollars for police equipment and staffing and tracking systems -- in what
would otherwise be a shrinking industry, as the aging of the American
population has caused the rate of virtually every non-drug crime to actually
plummet in recent years.

Oh, the "War on Drugs" is working very well if your goal is
to track where even law-abiding Americans go and who they call on the
telephone and what they do with their money. It's only "not working"
if we naively suppose the purpose is to stop people from voluntarily ingesting
drugs -- which was actually given up as a lost cause in this country when
they legalized "demon rum" in 1933.

At this point, it may even be legitimate to ask whether the folks rolling
in the clover in the law enforcement and criminal defense and prison industries
really want to see drug use reduced in this country. Imagine the kind
of unemployment that would then ravage those "growth" industries
if that were ever to happen.

Why, the drug warriors might even have to figure out some new "demon"
to pursue -- just the way Harry Anslinger and a small group of other soon-to-be-unemployed
Prohibition agents hit on a plan to launch a new "anti-marihuana"
campaign just as that earlier "War on Drugs" was shutting down,
back in 1933 and '34.

Any government program which spends money secretly, and which is thus
totally lacking in accountability to the taxpayers who fund it, is dangerous
and unacceptable in a free country, even before we start talking about
the kind of invasions of privacy and systematic trampling of the Bill
of Rights which are now widely (albeit foolishly) accepted as "necessary
if we want to win this War on Drugs."

If there is a way to convince people to stop frittering their lives away
in drug use, it's likely to be through stronger communities and families
and churches and temples -- all focuses of energy and money and public
attention from which programs like HIDTA only divert us.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling
Nelson at 952-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays
on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224;
or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.